My colleague Jeffrey Simpson is right: There is no Tea Party in Canada, and likely never will be. One reason is that so many Canadians still trust their government. In fact, we’re always calling on the government to fix something or other. Do we face an epidemic of Alzheimer’s? We need a national strategy! Is there a rash of youthful suicides in the Far North? The government must do something! We retain a touching faith that there’s nothing governments can’t do if only they set their minds to it.
In the U.S., most people believe government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. And in their case, they’re right.
The Founding Fathers were highly suspicious of a too-powerful central government. After all, they’d fought a revolution to free themselves from one. So they devised all kinds of checks and balances that make it difficult to get things done. It’s hard enough when a president has both the House and Senate on his side. When they’re split, it’s harder. And in an age of brokerage politics, when nearly all major legislation requires payoffs to powerful companies and industries, the only certain winners are highly paid lobbyists and lawyers. This applies even to such progressive initiatives as health-care reform, when Barack Obama was obliged to buy off the health insurers and pharmaceutical companies with subsidies and guarantees that they’d come out ahead – with the extra costs passed along to the consumer. No wonder trust in government is virtually gone.
By contrast, our parliamentary system is pleasantly authoritarian. We have no obstreperous elected Senate to bog things down (and let’s hope we keep it that way). Even minority governments are able to get things done, while majority ones can be downright tyrannical. (If you think Stephen Harper is a dictator, perhaps you don’t remember Jean Chrétien.) Britain’s coalition government has imposed a draconian austerity plan to deal with its budget deficit, which includes delays to retirement and the layoff of hundreds of thousands of government workers. Britain’s deficit (11.4 per cent of its overall economy) isn’t that much larger in relative terms than the U.S. deficit (8.9 per cent). Yet, such a plan would be impossible to imagine in today’s United States.
The U.S. political system makes coalitions virtually impossible, and the polarization of right and left is a further barrier to reform. Canada, by contrast, doesn’t go in for polarization. We prefer the mushy, pragmatic middle. All our federal governments rule from the centre, give or take a centimetre or two, which is why we’re witnessing the curious sight of Michael Ignatieff trying to attack the Conservatives for waste and reckless spending. Despite the petty bickering of Question Period, our political consensus runs deep, and the two main parties basically agree on every major economic matter.
But America’s problems go far deeper than its ideological divides. The question is not whether Democrats or Republicans will ultimately prevail, but whether the political culture can evolve enough to tackle fundamental institutional reforms. These reforms are essential if the U.S. is to fight its way back to prosperity amidst the global economic upheaval. It won’t be easy. As the astute thinker Walter Russell Mead argues, the U.S. will have to dramatically reduce the size and cost of its government and legal, health and education systems, while finding ways to make them more productive. It will have to do these things while people worry they’ll never again be as well off as they were before.
The old elite of the progressive Democratic left can’t lead the people to the promised land – but neither can the angry new right. Yet, as the Titanic sinks beneath them, it’s entirely likely that they’ll spend the next two years refighting health-care reform.
Meantime, the voters have grown increasingly impatient. For the third time in a row – in 2006, 2008 and now 2010 – they’ve thrown the rascals out in the admittedly unlikely hope that a new set of rascals might do better. As Republican pollster Bill McInturff said, voters “are going to keep throwing people out until they get it right.” And that could take a long, long time.
